April 02, 2008 by sharky
By nature, I’m not a whiner about the little things in life. And even if I was, I most certainly wouldn’t take it out on my helpless website. But I’m pissed - and what better way get a message across than to post it on my own site. However, much to the dismay of my blog, I’ll make an exception.
Rogers Canada - Changes to their TOS
Rogers’ customers were in for a shock this week when letters arrived across the country in reference to changes in their Terms of Service.
Not only have they jacked up the price of my Internet service by $2 a month starting in March, but now they’ve put a cap on monthly bandwidth, as well. The new limit is 95 GB per month, with an additional $1.50 per GB. This is not good news to P2P file sharers on Rogers. Not into the P2P scene? No matter, this is gonna hurt you, too! You’ll have to start being careful about how much YouTube you watch and streaming audio you listen to. All those things add up fast!
Rogers + Sandvine = P2P Throttling
There’s little doubt in the minds of Rogers’ subscribers that they actively employ throttling & shaping schemes on P2P traffic, much in the same way that Comcast does. At times I’ve seen my BitTorrent download rates drop to as little as 3 KB/s, even less, for weeks at a time. To alleviate this I’ve incorporated every single anti-throttling technique known, incuding SSH, proxies, obvuscation, tunneling, advanced BitTorrent client hacks & mods — you name it, I’ve tried it.
Indeed, it now appears that Rogers is waving the white flag against their P2P-loving customers. With a new motto of “Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, charge ‘em extra”, does this mean they’ll do away with the traffic shaping? Not likely.
The Rogers Letter
All Rogers’ Internet clients would have received this same TOS update letter. Notice near the bottom that my stats are “off the map” in terms of bandwidth usage.
In response, here is the exact “e-letter” that I sent to them:
Fellow Rogers customers, I urge you to do the same. While this will likely have any effect on the changes in their TOS, you don’t have to be bullied by your corporate Internet company. They aren’t the only horse in town. Bye, bye, Rogers Canada.
On a final note, these changes don’t go into effect until June, 2008. That means I have two months to download like a f*ckin’ madman!! You all excuse me, now. I’m off to BestBuy to stock up on blank DVDs.
I’ll update this post with their response to my letter.
Archived by FSFmirror
